Quote of the Day: “It was moider!”

 

‘I decided that when I appeared before the Committee I would expose them as being the un-Americans. That’s the line I took. When I began to testify, I immediately said I had knowledge of un-American activities through mny research. I said, “Look, I have a list of synagogues that have been burned. I have a list of homes of blacks in the South and in the North that Ku Klux Klansmen have defaced. I want to give the Committee all of my research and my knowledge of these un-American activities.” They said, believe it or not, “We’re not interested in that.” I said, “Let’s make a note of that–you’re not interested in these un-American activities that I have knowledge of.” Then I defied the Committee, using every constitutional amendment there was to keep them from shutting me up, and showed that they had been in business around seventeen years, with the purpose of recommending legislation to Congress, and yet they had never in all those years proposed a single piece of legislation. I attacked them as being part of a conspiracy to impose censorship on American theater and film, because as soon as you tell people who they can’t and won’t hire, you also tell them what they can and can’t present. That was my line, and I got away with it.’

~ Lionel Stander, in Tender Comrades, a Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.

This book, a collection of fascinating interviews with prominent blacklistees (including directors Jules Dassin, Martin Ritt and John Berry), is the best I’ve read so far on the witch-hunt years, maybe tied with Only Victims, the published version of actor Robert Vaughn’s doctoral thesis, which is also a marvellously wise and impassioned account of the period — in his closing chapter Vaughn convincingly argues that American cinema’s development was seriously stunted by the climate of fear surrounding any kind of political discussion. 

(Somebody told me Vaughn has taken a swerve to the right in his political views more recently. I’d hate to think this was true.)